On Friday I didn’t kickboard at all — I just didn’t. And Erika, who was clearly Lane Four material — perfectly apace, never passed, never passing — said, You know, it’s weird. It gets easier if you keep going.
I knew that was a story people told. I said, I’m just resting. I lodged myself into the corner of the lane line and the wall. I turned to my left and saw a twig of a swimmer in Lane Six staring at me. Her swimsuit was pink Day-Glo and she looked around twelve. She was shaking water out of her goggles and she wasn’t trying to hide that she was staring. I lifted my arms and did some stretches. For all she knew, I was stopping on purpose. Even if Erika believed the story that it got easier with practice, it couldn’t be that story alone that got her to punt herself through 200 yards of kickboarding. She started better. She told herself that story and she started and swam better, swam blind.
At night I pressed my hands to my nose and smelled chlorine. I sniffed my arms and found the crease of my elbow to be particularly pungent. I burrowed my head and breathed deep.
I swam in my dreams.
They weren’t dreams about swimming. They were boring dreams where I was doing my day and I’d reach for my jacket from the closet hook and my arm would arc cleanly toward it. I would take a math test and solve a proof without coming up for air. I’d walk from Erika’s house to my grandparents’ in Connecticut as if the houses were next door and it would be my strong, kicking legs that propelled me.
In one dream I was in the basement of the Space Needle, and trying to ascend it was like gripping a kickboard and not getting anywhere.
In one dream each breath wrapped a thick black thread around my lungs.
One dream was in the locker room. Alexis sat next to me on the bench and put her head on my shoulder. In another dream in the locker room, I overheard Alexis tell Melanie that she’d done something with Greg in the bathroom and I knew the word they used was code for blow job.
One night I was so tired from practice that I didn’t dream, or I didn’t remember my dreams.
Two dreams were blue.
I LAY IN bed for a while, drifting. It felt so amazing to get a Saturday. My bed felt amazing, and so did my body, which had never felt so completely drained. I didn’t get sick often, but the way my body felt reminded me of that — the gaping relief in not being up for anything. This must be how jocks felt all the time. It was better than being sick. It was more honest. Pledge nosed the door open and curled up on the bed at my feet. Pledge didn’t ask anything of me but the opportunity to lie on my bed and keep my feet warm. This must be how Alexis, with her year-round sports, felt every Saturday morning, so drained and luxurious. I liked thinking of her lying like me, awake but in bed, in sweatpants, nuzzling lazily into the day.
The phone rang, and I heard my dad pick it up. His soft knock came at my door.
Erika said, Lazybones! I was up at seven and couldn’t get back to sleep. She said, Don’t you feel this adrenaline? Exercise is amazing.
I said, Are you going to go swimming today?
She said, I would. She said, But we probably shouldn’t overdo it.
I said, I was joking. The day I imagined involved reading in bed until I got hungry, and then, after breakfast, watching TV in my pajamas. Saturday afternoon wasn’t great for TV, but I could find something. It was too bad I didn’t like watching sports. Without really wanting to, I said, Do you want to come over later and watch TV?
Erika said, Today’s River Market.
Maybe I was sick. Walking around in the rain looking at the same necklaces and Guatemala bags we’d been looking at and not buying for months was the opposite of the day I wanted, standing under an awning watching skaters because Erika wanted to. Erika said, It’s almost Christmas. We should go.
I said, Maybe you should go without me.
She said, Do you have plans?
My bed was a warm glove holding me. Not even my parents, or especially not my parents, made it so difficult for me to say no to them. Erika needed to try actually talking to a skater if she wanted to go out with one. Once she got a boyfriend she’d start to make plans without me. I said, Okay, I’ll come.
She said, Oh good, I knew you’d say yes. She said, Don’t worry, you’re more fun than you think you are.
My dad had a walk in Northwest with his men’s group, and he offered to drop me downtown on the way. I was early to meet Erika. Camera World was right there and I went in and dropped off the roll of film from my dad’s camera. Out on 10th Avenue, all the punk-rock street kids with their puppies on ropes and their old coffee cans out for change had moved under the overhang of the Galleria to get out of the rain. One asked me for a quarter. He had a cute yellow puppy on a rope. I didn’t have any change. If Erika didn’t have change she sometimes gave away a dollar. It was cold and gray and already I could feel my thin socks dampening. All my wool socks were dirty. If I’d stayed home I could have done the wash and pulled on my wool socks fresh and warm from the dryer. Buses to places whose names I knew only from the signs on the buses went by with their lights on.
Rich’s was crowded, not only with the usual young men and old men but some families with umbrellas, tourists, looking to get out of the rain. A towheaded pack of them blocked the sports section. R.E.M. was on the cover of half the music magazines. It was unlikely, but possible, that they would talk about Country Feedback in an interview. Not that any of their song lyrics made sense, but I wanted, for some reason, to know, not what the song was about, but what Michael Stipe was thinking about when he wrote it. Rolling Stone had nothing and neither did Alternative Press. The radio didn’t play it, and no one else who liked R.E.M. ever mentioned it. The song might as well have been a ghost. It might as well have only been on my copy of the tape.
The guy appeared next to me with an armload of magazines. He said, That’s wild, I was just thinking about you. He put the magazines down. He said, After you left last time, I remembered why I knew you. Are you Jordan’s sister? He said, You are, right? That’s wild. You don’t remember me.
I said, Who are you?
He said, Ben. I was a friend of Jordan’s. He said, No swimming magazines today?
The towheaded family had moved from the sports racks. I could see the covers of the new month’s issues. I said, How did you know him?
He said, Just school. I swam for a minute.
I said, You said you didn’t.
He laughed. He said, You’re right. He said, What about you?
I said, I took some time off.
He said, But you’re swimming now?
I said, Yes.
He said, Right on. What’s your race?
I said, We haven’t decided that yet. I haven’t chosen a specialty.
He said, That’s cool. Jordan was like that, too.
I said, No he wasn’t. He was just good at everything.
Ben said, True enough.
Ben was wearing the clay bead on the cord around his neck, and he rubbed the bead between his fingers. He was wearing a T-shirt of The Smiths. I knew they were a band but I didn’t know what they sounded like or what type of person would listen to them. From the look of the photo on the shirt, of a man’s bare chest half in shadow, I doubted they were a band my brother would listen to. Still, Ben may have been in touch with my brother and could tell me something about where he was and what he was doing. Ben may have known what my brother had said the last time he’d mentioned me.